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Brothel 35

Fittingly, Brothel 35 stands empty and broken, just as were the lives of the untold number of women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery within its walls.

I've documented a fair amount of disturbing places over the past few years, but on the day I ventured into this place I saw what was the most horrifying left-behind site that I can remember. This abandoned brothel in Kanchanaburi, known simply as ‘Ssong 35’ (short for 'song soh-pay-nee 35’ , or house of prostitution 35), was open from the mid 1960's to around 1986 & was an operation of human trafficking. I was led here by several Thai ghost-hunting articles that I read online They describe it as the ‘most horrifying and scary place in Thailand’ and as a ‘prostitute tomb’. After hearing the history and visiting this ghastly place, I have to agree with that assessment.

The information that I have on Brothel 35 was gathered from it’s neighbours and from online research. The first person we met when we arrived was an elderly woman who has lived next to the brothel her entire life. She is now aged 85, a mother to 11, and asked one of her sons to give us a tour of the premises, as they described themselves as caretakers of the property. I estimated the years of activity of the brothel from information given by the elderly lady, who we called ‘Khun Yaii’, or ‘grandma’. She said it opened when she was around 30 years old, making the opening sometime in the mid 1960’s. Her son, the man who showed us into the property said that it closed when he was 12, which would make that year 1986 as he is now aged 45. Khun Yaii stressed that she was never employed at the brothel, but has lived nearby for all of her life.

The building itself is surrounded by a towering, thick, 3-meter high outer wall, with inner walls of the same height and thickness separating different sections of the outer yard, making the premises deliberately maze-like. The walls once had razor-sharp metal spikes on top to prevent escape, but all have been removed over the years by scrap-metal scavengers. The main entrance is a large metal gate with pointed lances across the top, and either side of the gate has security peep-holes with sliding metal openings which were used to check identities of those wishing to enter. The former parking lot and garden area is now a forest, where 3 decades of tropical growth have provided a canopy of trees and undergrowth. From the air, it appears as if the foliage is consuming the building, which, in my opinion, it can’t do soon enough. Patrons entered the brothel through the lobby, where they would look into the windowed ‘fish-bowl’, a bleacher-like stepped sitting area for the women, still commonplace in sex service establishments across the nation. There they would sit, wearing numbers, waiting to be chosen by a customer. The area behind the fish-bowl is a small preparation room with a crawl-space for hiding, a surreptitious feature that exists in multiple areas on this site. Once a customer chose a girl, they would then meet at the head of the main hallways, the entrance area to the girls’ rooms. This is the largest interior area of the brothel. It consisted of 3 hallways, two on the outside and one in the centre. The centre was just an open walkway, while the two outer hallways had 10 rooms on each side, making a total of 40 rooms in which the women lived and worked throughout the day and night. Each room had a bed, a toilet area, and sparse furniture along with any personal belongings of it’s inhabitant. The front walls of the rooms have a wide ventilation space above the door and ceiling, large enough for someone to crawl through, if only they hadn’t been covered with metal bars to prevent any slipping through. These tiny rooms are where, for over 20 years, an unknowable number of women and girls ate, slept, and had sex with up to 40 men in a single day.

The area behind the brothel has a large water tower with concrete washing troughs used for the women to bathe; the toilets in the individual rooms were very small and did not contain bathing facilities. Next to the water tower is a basement/hiding space built with a cement-lidded 60x60cm entrance hole. The hiding space was used to conceal the workers during police raids so that the police could say, ‘officially’, that they saw no sex workers or prostitution activities on site during their visits. There would, of course, have been plenty of evidence of the presence of sex workers in the 40-odd rooms where the women lived and worked. However, this was more of a formality as the local police were most certainly aware of, if not directly involved in the operation, customarily taking regular payoffs in cash and/or sexual services in order to allow the brothel to operate. Brothel 35 was famous in this quiet region 150 km from Bangkok, and operated for decades, so to say that local authorities were oblivious to its operation would be farcical. I did not see this basement hideaway area while exploring the site as the opening is covered over and hidden. I only heard about it after reading some Thai investigative sites once I’d left the area. The sites are linked below and one of them contains video footage of the entrance to the hiding space.

The main purpose of Brothel 35's security measures was to keep the women from escaping, rather than keeping them safe from intruders. Some of the workers came of their own free will and chose to work at the brothel, but many more were forced into sex work by traffickers who tricked & deceived them, purchased them directly from relatives, or kidnapped them from far-away rural villages. The majority of the workers came from northern Thailand, where there is an abundance of poverty-stricken families with attractive young women and girls, making it a fruitful predation ground for traffickers. Considering the standard methods of human trafficking, it’s very likely that a number of the ‘women' were actually underage, and were kept there against their will, used as sex slaves to earn profits for the proprietors. Teenage girls were highly sought after by such establishments, as they were both more appealing to the men and easier to control than older, more experienced workers. The women worked most of the day and served up to 40 clients in that time. If they refused to work, they were beaten into submission. If they became ill or diseased, they were not treated, but left to suffer and die in the brothel, with their bodies covertly removed & disposed of elsewhere. If they got pregnant, they were forced to have abortions and continue working. Some parts of this horrendous story could be written off as pure speculation, as anyone involved in such an operation would not be willing to provide first-hand accounts. However, these gruesome details are easy to accept as truth when walking through this grim, decaying venue. You quickly realise the exact purpose of the walls, the metal spikes, the locked doors and the hiding spots. It was a prison.

The brothel was open 24-hours a day, 7-days per week, and catered to a diverse array of clientele. Johns ranged from the local affluent, businessmen & politicians to blue-collar laborers. All who had the cash to pay were served, however the patrons would have been predominantly local, as this location would have been far off the beaten path of visiting tourists, unless they had Thai connections. In addition, offering services to foreign clientele would have opened the brothel up to a greater risk; international attention was not something the proprietors of ‘Ssong 35’ wanted.

As a man (and as a human being), it’s hard to imagine how someone could walk into what was obviously a place where women and young girls were kept against their will and subjected to horrendous treatment, and still have no problem with purchasing them for sex. Prostitution is the oldest of trades. When sex work is consensual and workers are in control of how they use their bodies and what clients they see, what each party does their own personal choice. However, when any person, especially a child, is being forced to have sex with multiple people against their will (raped), it becomes some of the worst atrocity that humans are capable of committing.

I’ll never forget Ssong 35. The upsetting thoughts of what occurred there will always haunt me. If I’m honest, I’ve had some nightmares since I visited. Although hope that this abandoned site is eaten away by nature more rapidly than others, what happened here should never be overlooked, as it still occurs in places just like this, all over the world, but just out of sight.